A click on "restaurants london" costs £0.84, one on "restaurants covent garden" £0.94, one on "restaurants near me" £0.30. A click on "corporate catering london" costs £14.47, seventeen times as much (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242). That gap is all you need to know to decide whether Google Ads makes sense for a restaurant: for tonight's dinner almost never, for catering, events and weddings almost always.
Google Ads for restaurants works when it sells a service the Google Business Profile does not cover on its own (catering, private parties, corporate dinners, Christmas parties, weddings, delivery, an opening or the high season in a tourist area), with local Search campaigns targeted by radius, a dedicated page for each service, and calls and enquiries tracked as conversions. To get people to a table on an ordinary day, the local pack already answers for free and ads add little.
An honest note: the keyword "google ads for restaurants" gets about 10 searches a month in the UK. Few restaurateurs search for it. Below we explain why the ads rarely pay for ordinary covers, and where the money does pay. The organic side is in the companion article on SEO for restaurants.
How much a click costs in hospitality
Two worlds. "Where shall we eat tonight" searches cost between £0.30 and £1 a click, among the lowest CPCs of all the sectors we follow. Service searches, from people who have to organise something for twenty or a hundred people, sit between £2 and £15.
| Keyword | Searches/month | Average CPC | Top of page bid (high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| corporate catering london | 390 | £14.47 | £11.71 |
| christmas party venues london | 590 | £11.82 | £12.72 |
| party venues london | 1,300 | £3.44 | £3.07 |
| private dining london | 2,900 | £2.94 | £3.50 |
| wedding catering | 1,900 | £2.93 | £3.21 |
| catering london | 2,900 | £2.81 | £6.34 |
| catering manchester | 590 | £2.54 | £2.53 |
| pizza delivery london | 210 | £2.26 | £2.71 |
| function room hire manchester | 210 | £2.05 | £2.43 |
| takeaway delivery | 1,900 | £1.15 | £1.47 |
| restaurants covent garden | 18,100 | £0.94 | £1.23 |
| book a table | 4,400 | £0.85 | £1.92 |
| restaurants london | 40,500 | £0.84 | £1.23 |
| birthday restaurants london | 2,400 | £0.68 | £1.09 |
| restaurants edinburgh | 27,100 | £0.66 | £0.97 |
| restaurants open now | 2,900 | £0.62 | £1.43 |
| pizza near me | 550,000 | £0.49 | £1.50 |
| brunch london | 22,200 | £0.40 | £0.81 |
| restaurants near me | 11,100,000 | £0.30 | £1.32 |
A detail that says a lot about the sector: "restaurant advertising" (140 searches a month) has a CPC of £11.98. The people buying that click are the agencies selling advertising to restaurateurs, and they pay 14 times what a click on "restaurants london" would cost. If someone offers you Google Ads to fill the dining room on a Tuesday, ask them for their CPCs.
A limit of the data: these are national Google UK averages. The real CPC in your account depends on the auction in your area and on your quality score, so measure it in the first weeks rather than trusting the planner.
Further reading: Google Ads statistics for 2026, to compare CPCs and conversion rates across sectors.
When Google Ads makes sense for a restaurant, and when it does not
On the SERP we scanned for "restaurants covent garden", searched from London on desktop, there were no ads at the top. A local pack with three Google Business Profiles (Brother Marcus with 6,200 reviews, Arcade and Harry's with 1,400 each), Tripadvisor, OpenTable and DesignMyNight in the "find results on" carousel, then guides from Covent Garden's own site, travel blogs and magazines. Whoever is looking for somewhere to eat tonight finds the answer there, and an ad at £0.94 saying "Restaurant in Covent Garden, book now" competes with three profiles showing stars, photos, distance and opening hours.
The common belief in the trade is that "Google Ads doesn't work for a restaurant". It is half true: it does not work for selling covers. It works for selling everything with a value per enquiry of hundreds or thousands of pounds that the profile cannot explain. Five cases where we open an account without hesitation:
- Catering and corporate events. "Catering london" gets 2,900 searches a month and "christmas party venues london" goes from 2,400 searches in September to 260 in December: one order for fifty covers is worth a month of budget.
- Weddings, birthdays, parties. "Wedding catering" 1,900 searches a month, "party venues london" 1,300, "birthday restaurants london" 2,400, "private dining london" 2,900. Not many searches, but each is a booking for 20-150 people.
- Delivery with direct ordering. If you have your own ordering system and want to avoid the platforms' commission. Volumes are small ("pizza delivery london" 210, "takeaway delivery" 1,900 nationally), so the campaign stays small.
- An opening or a change of ownership. The Google profile takes months to collect reviews; ads cover those months.
- Tourist areas in high season. "Restaurants covent garden" gets 9,900 searches in June and 33,100 in November: people searching from outside the area do not see the local pack of your street, they see the one for the centre.
If none of these cases applies to you, the budget does more spent on the profile and the photos. We say that knowing we sell campaign management.
Further reading: when Google Ads makes sense.
Which campaign to open first
A Search campaign, with radius targeting around the restaurant, and for at least two months only that. Not the "Smart" campaign Google offers when you open the account, not Display, not Performance Max on day one.
The radius depends on the service. For catering 20-30 km, because the van travels. For a party in the dining room 10-15 km. For delivery the actual delivery radius, and nothing more. In the location settings choose "Presence" (people in the area) and not "Presence or interest", otherwise you pay for clicks from people reading about London in Glasgow. The exception is the tourist area: there "interest" is useful, because whoever books a table in Covent Garden for December searches for it from home in November.
Performance Max comes later, and only linked to the Google Business Profile with the "store visits" and "calls" goals. It needs real conversions to learn: switched on in a new account it optimises for whatever it finds, meaning page views, and reports that all is well. At Contesini Consulenze, a business with two offices in the province of Mantua in Italy, we added it after Search had gathered the first enquiries: the result over seven months was 299 enquiries at €7.20 each, 68% of which became sales conversations. The sector is different; the model (local Search first, Performance Max with the profile later) is the one we would use for a restaurant with catering to sell.
How to structure the account
One campaign for each service, because each service has a different CPC, value per enquiry and landing page. For a London restaurant with a private dining room and catering, the typical structure is this.
- Catering and corporate. Keywords: "catering london", "corporate catering london", "office catering", "christmas party venues london", "team lunch". CPC £3-15, the highest budget, live from September to December and from April to June.
- Private events. "Private dining london", "party venues", "birthday restaurants", "christening venue", "graduation dinner". CPC £1-3.50.
- Delivery. Only if you have direct ordering. "Pizza delivery + area", "takeaway delivery + area". CPC £1-2.50, very tight radius, live from 6pm to 10pm.
- Generic local. "Seafood restaurant london", "japanese restaurant london", "brunch london": only in the cases seen above (opening, high season), otherwise paused.
On match types: phrase match for service keywords ("catering london", "private dining london") and broad match only after a month of data, with the negatives already in order. Broad match on day one, in hospitality, buys recipes.
The negative keywords to load before switching on: "recipe", "how to make", "dough", "homemade" (recipe searches are huge: "pizza" gets 368,000 searches a month and "pizza dough recipe" 60,500), "jobs", "waiter", "chef", "vacancies", "franchise", "for sale", "lease", "menu" on its own, "free", the platforms' names (opentable, deliveroo, uber eats, just eat) and the towns you do not serve. Then the search terms report every week for the first month.
In the ads: the town or area in the headline, the service, a real number ("catering menus from £X a head", "private room for up to 80"), the call asset with the restaurant's number, the location asset linked to the profile (it shows address and distance) and sitelinks to the menu, photos of the room and booking. If you sell alcohol, Google allows it in the UK with limits: no promotion of excessive drinking, no targeting of under-18s, and the ad may be restricted until Google has reviewed it.
Further reading: long tail and short tail keywords, how to choose.
The landing page is not the home page
The most expensive mistake we find in restaurant accounts: every campaign sends people to the home page, which tells the family's story and has an OpenTable "Book" button. Someone who searched "catering london" and lands there closes the page.
One page per service, with five things: the service menu with "from" prices, photos of a real event you ran, the capacity or delivery radius, three reviews quoted with names, and a short form (name, date, number of guests, phone) plus a tappable number and WhatsApp. The booking platform's button is not needed here: nobody organising a wedding books through a widget.
The form should work as a filter. A required "number of guests" field stops the catering campaign collecting requests for four people, and the "date" field tells you straight away whether you can do it. The same principle we use for B2B landing pages: fewer enquiries, more useful ones.
What to track as a conversion
The real conversions
- Call from the ad (call asset), counted only if it lasts more than 30 seconds.
- Call from the website, with Google's forwarding number or call tracking, same threshold.
- Enquiry form submission, with the thank-you page as the event.
- Click on WhatsApp.
- Confirmed booking, imported by hand each month from the OpenTable or other booking platform dashboard if the widget does not pass the data.
The conversions that are not
The click on the "Book" button that opens the widget, viewing the menu, scrolling, 30 seconds on the page. They are signals, not results, and should be set as secondary actions, otherwise the algorithm optimises for them. It is not a theoretical risk: at Valore Solare we found a month with 15,267 "conversions" against 5,467 clicks, and at Sunscape 1,487 conversions at €0.61 that were technical events. In both cases the report looked happy on paper and the campaign brought in nothing.
Directions requests from the profile are a separate case: they count as a conversion only for the generic local campaign, and only as a secondary one.
Further reading: how to set up Google Analytics to count enquiries, not visits.
The minimum budget, worked out from real CPCs
The sums are simple, and they should be done for each service separately.
Catering in London. CPC £2.81 on "catering london". With a 3% conversion rate (one enquiry every 33 clicks, realistic for a page with a form and prices) an enquiry costs about £94; at 5% about £56. With £20 a day, £600 a month, you buy around 210 clicks and get 6-11 enquiries. If one in three becomes an order for 40 people at £35 a head, that month's budget is paid back several times. On "corporate catering london", at £14.47, the same budget buys about 40 clicks and one or two enquiries: if that is your market, the budget has to be higher. Below £15 a day the campaign does not collect enough clicks to be read.
Private events. Average CPC between £2 and £3.50, say £3. At a 5% conversion rate an enquiry costs £60. With £10 a day, £300 a month, about 100 clicks and around 5 enquiries for parties, private dining and weddings.
Generic local. CPC £0.84 on "restaurants london". At 5% a booking costs about £17; at 10%, possible if the page has the widget at the top, about £8. With £10 a day, around 12 clicks and roughly one booking a day. On an average bill it can pay for itself, but the local pack brings the same bookings for free: that is why we keep it paused outside openings and the high season.
A warning about the first two months. The cost per enquiry at the start is always higher than these sums: at Valore Solare the first month produced 9 enquiries at €212 each, and the average cost over eleven months fell to €70.78. At Macropix the cost per enquiry went from €94 in 2024 to €39.44 in 2025 on the same account. The minimum budget has to be held for at least three months, or you learn nothing.
Further reading: the benefits of Google Ads and how to measure them.
Seasonality and hours: when to switch on and when to switch off
Hospitality has a seasonality that monthly volumes show better than any calendar. "Christmas party venues london": 2,400 searches in September, 1,600 in October, 720 in November, 260 in December, then 210-320 until June. "Wedding catering": 2,900 in September and 2,400 in October and January, when people are planning, against 1,300 in December. "Restaurants covent garden": 33,100 in November against 9,900 in June. "Brunch london": 27,100 in October and November, 18,100 in June to August.
The budget follows these curves, not the average. A Christmas party campaign spent entirely in September and October is worth three times the same amount spread across the year: by December the parties are already booked.
On hours: the generic local campaign and delivery should run only when someone can answer the phone or take the order, usually 11am-2pm and 6pm-10pm. Catering and events are the opposite and work in office hours, because whoever organises the work Christmas party does it from their desk. An account without an ad schedule pays for clicks at three in the morning from people who will never book.
The mistakes we find in restaurant accounts
- The "Smart" campaign created by the setup wizard, targeting the whole "United Kingdom" with keywords suggested by Google: a restaurant in Leeds paying for clicks from Brighton.
- Conversion set on page views or on the widget click: the report says 300 conversions, the restaurant has not seen a single extra booking.
- Broad match without negatives: half the spend on "carbonara recipe" and "waiter jobs".
- Every campaign pointing to the home page.
- No ad schedule and no seasonality: the same budget in November and in August.
- Performance Max as the first and only campaign, with no profile linked.
- Remarketing to people who viewed the menu: in hospitality the lists are too small to be useful, and the cost of managing them outweighs the return. It is only worth it for catering and events, where someone who asked for a quote decides over weeks.
Further reading: how to do remarketing when the list is small.
Google Ads or SEO?
For everyday covers, SEO: that is, the Google Business Profile, reviews, a small and consistent website, pages by area and occasion. We covered it with SERP data in SEO for restaurants. For high-value services, Google Ads: catering or a wedding does not come from the local pack, and pages built for "catering london" take months to rank against specialist caterers.
The two help each other more than it seems. The service pages built for the campaigns are the same ones that then rank organically, and the Google Ads search terms report is the most precise keyword research a restaurant can have: it tells you which words people use to look for your service in your town, which no tool returns for volumes this small. The general reasoning is in SEO and Google Ads together.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to advertise a restaurant on Google?
A click costs from £0.30 ("restaurants near me") to £14.47 ("corporate catering london"). The minimum budget with which we see anything is £10 a day for events and generic local, £15-20 for catering, for at least three months. Below that, there is too little data to decide.
Is Google Ads better than sponsored posts on Instagram and Facebook?
They are two different moments. On Google you catch people already looking for catering or a venue; on Meta you show the dish to people who were not looking for anything. For services with an explicit request (catering, weddings) Google returns more per pound spent; for a new menu or an opening, Meta reaches more people in the area. Cost per enquiry should be compared with the same tracking, not with the numbers in the two dashboards.
Is it worth advertising delivery?
Only if you have your own ordering system. Volumes are small ("pizza delivery london" 210 searches a month) because people order inside the apps, and an ad that sends people to Deliveroo or Just Eat pays for the click and the commission together. With direct ordering and a 3-4 km radius a small evening campaign can hold up.
Can I advertise wine and cocktails?
In the UK yes, under Google's alcohol policy and the CAP Code rules on alcohol: no promotion of excessive drinking, nothing aimed at under-18s, and the ad may be limited until reviewed. An ad for "wine tasting with a matched menu" goes through; one built on drinking as much as possible for a low flat price is the kind of message both sets of rules are designed to stop.
Do I need a Google Business Profile to run Google Ads?
It is not mandatory, but without it you have no location asset (address, distance and map in the ad), you cannot count calls and directions from the profile, and Performance Max has nothing to work with. Linking it takes ten minutes from the "Linked accounts" section.
Where to start
Take the last year of catering, party and corporate dinner requests you received by phone or email and count how many there were and how much they were worth on average. If there are more than one a month and each is worth more than £500, you have a service Google Ads can multiply: build the page for that service with prices and photos, and open a single radius-targeted Search campaign with £15 a day for three months. If there are fewer, the money works harder on the profile. If you want us to look at the numbers together, get in touch.
